Guyana : Hello India , What about Africa ?
One Caribbean Nation.
President of
Guyana, Irfann Ali, is making great overtures and receiving extremely impressive developmental aid in agriculture
, energy, and other areas from India. We hope that in time similar efforts will be made
toward Africa ; there is no need to pretend that Guyana is solely an Indo Guyanese
country.
We also note, and have supported the efforts of Prime
Minister of Barbados, reactivation of ties with Africa. However, the Afro
population of Barbados, easily makes it , a Black country. Afro Barbadians make up over ninety percent of its citizens. The Indo Guyanese population numbers in Guyana are not that lopsided. The races are relatively close in terms of population numbers.
We therefore suggest that President Ali, recognizes the
importance of also seeking stronger ties with Africa because it will be folly to exclude the cultural and economic ties that Afro Guyanese can benefit from with ties to their homeland.
We are not going to suggest that the late President of Guyana , Forbes Burnham, was perfect, but when questioned about the reason for referring to Guyana as a Cooperative Republic he said :
"Well, we rejected the capitalist system ! For us it has only meant domination and exploitation. We are socialists. We in Guyana wanted to find a vehicle that would involve the the small man in the in the economy of the country, and give him, eventually, as dominate a role in the economy as he has in politics by virtue of the vote. And we identified the cooperative because it's part of the history of the earliest Amerindians in this country; it's part of the history of freed slaves in Guyana. In fact , where we are sitting here now, my house, is part of a village, Victoria, the first village in Guyana bought on a cooperative basis by freed black slaves. So far as Indians who came from India subsequently are concerned, also, they have a history of cooperatism . We thought the cooperative could be our instrument, giving as it does an opportunity to the ordinary man to participate, pooling his resources without us and with the assistance of government, being able to take ahold of the economy ".
We hope that with its newly found abundance of wealth, President Ali realises that the economic wealth of Guyana is for all Guyanese. Failure to recognise this could lead to serious socio-economic problems , in what is now being deemed the new Guyana.
Here is a fairly accurate account of the populations of Guyana and Barbados :
Population of Guyana : 805, 000 :
44 % Indo
30% Afro
20% Mixed
Population of Barbados: 300,000 :
93% Afro
4% White
2 % Mixed/others
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